Al Qaeda’s second in command, Ayman al-Zawahri, just
recently declared on one of the websites al Qaeda uses to spread its propaganda
that “the United Nations is an enemy of Islam and Muslims.”

Strange that Zawahri would kick a gift horse in the
mouth.In fact, the UN is one of the
best friends that Zawahri and his Islamic cohorts have today on the world stage.It has become the enemy of Israel and of Western democratic
values. Dominated by the Organization of
Islamic Conference (OIC), the UN General Assembly and the Human Rights Council in
particular provide political cover for virtually every crime against humanity
that the Islamists commit.

The OIC’s party line is that freedom of press and speech
must give way to respect for Islam by avoiding any criticism that could be
considered “defamation” in the eyes of Muslims.UN member states belonging to the Organization of Islamic Conference
have managed to push resolutions through the UN General Assembly and Human
Rights Council that condemn “defamation of religions.” The only religion singled out for protection is
Islam.

Late last month, the OIC formally introduced an amendment to
the mandate of the Human Rights Council’s Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression,
which would require the Special Rapporteur to "report on instances where
the abuse of the right of freedom of expression constitutes an act of racial or
religious discrimination.” The amendment
passed.In other words, the UN’s Rapporteur
on Freedom of Expression is now charged with the responsibility for policing expression that is deemed to go
too far in criticizing Islam.This turns
the role of the Special Rapporteur on its head.The proper role, of course, is not to monitor expression considered
abusive by some, but to consider and monitor abusive limits on any expression.

Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has unfortunately taken up
where Kofi Annan left off in kowtowing to the OIC’s party line.This was evident in his recent condemnation of
the Dutch film Fitna, which Ban
called “offensively anti-Islamic.”This
controversial film juxtaposes horrific scenes of killings and destruction at
the hands of the Islamic terrorists with verses from the Koran and excerpts of
incendiary speeches by Islamic leaders that are used to justify such acts of
terrorism.

Ban Ki-moon applauded “the efforts of the Government of the Netherlands to
stop the broadcast of this film” and appealed for “calm to those understandably
offended by it.”His appeal for calm has
not stopped the threats of violence against the film’s creator and against the
staff of a video website that had released it.

Ban Ki-moon said that the film traffics in what he calls
“hate speech” and “incitement to violence.”Therefore, he reasoned, the “right of free expression is not at stake
here.”

The best antidote to any distortions that the film may
contain in portraying the violent strains of Islam as practiced today is not to
ban the movie but to encourage more speech that debunks the film’s premise.This may be a difficult task, which explains
the pressure to suppress the film altogether.

The following are just a sampling of Koran verses that
sanction hatred and violence against non-Muslims:

"Kill
the disbelievers wherever we find them" (Koran, 2:191)

"O ye who believe! Take not
the Jews and the Christians for your friends: They are but friends to each
other" (Koran 5:51)

"Shall I tell you who, in the
sight of God, deserves a yet worse retribution than these? Those [the Jews]
whom God has rejected and whom He has condemned, and whom He has turned into
monkeys and pigs because they worshiped the powers of evil" (Koran 5:60)

"I will inspire terror into the
hearts of unbelievers: you smite them above their necks and smite all their
fingertips off of them" (Koran, 8:12)

"When we decide to destroy a
population, we send a definite order to them who have the good things in life
and yet sin. So that Allah's word is proven true against them, then we destroy
them utterly" (Koran, 17:16-17)

Islamic texts teach that the Koran's more violent passages such
as these supersede the peaceful passages that had been written earlier in
Muhammad’s life. Now there is no denying
that the Old Testament and other non-Muslim religious tracts surely contain
their own share of inflammatory language.However, Islam has not gone through the internal re-examination and
reformation that Western religions have.The leaders and thinkers who claim to speak in the name of Judaism and
Christianity today do not make a habit of interpreting their texts as literal justifications
for violence against non-believers as Muslim preachers still do.

The vilest hate speech and incitements to violence in the
world today appear daily in Muslim newspapers, in Muslim preachers’ sermons and
in the standard curriculum used by many Islamic schools.Yet only Westerners who write or speak negatively
about Islam’s excesses can be guilty of ‘hate speech’ in the eyes of UN
officials and other misguided politically correct apologists.

Respect for the bedrock freedoms of speech, press and
religion lie at the very heart of the difference in worldview between Western
democracies and Muslim theocratic or autocratic societies.Freedom
of religion and freedom of expression do not work at cross-purposes, as
Islamists tend to argue.To the
contrary, these individual freedoms are mutually reinforcing in protecting the
individual from subordination to governmental control.Religious believers, or non-believers for
that matter, have a right not to be persecuted or discriminated against on the
basis of their beliefs, but religion itself like all other ideas and
institutions benefits from the expression of diverse views.

As the International Freedom of Expression Exchange pointed
out in its opposition to the UN Human Rights Council’s efforts to legislate the
suppression of free speech, the “equality of all ideas and convictions before
the law and the right to debate them freely is the keystone of democracy…freedom
of expression is applicable not only to ‘information’ or ‘ideas’ that are
favourably received, but also to those that may offend, shock or disturb any or
all of us.”

Those who insist on strict adherence to the literal word of
Islamic law define everything in terms of the individual’s complete
subordination towards Allah.What this
means in practice is the surrender of any freedom to debate, criticize, mock or
in any way differ from the Islamists’ fundamentalist reading of the Koran and
Sharia which, in their mind, are immutable for all time and omnicompetent in
all matters.It is this primitive
worldview that the United Nations is now on record yet again as protecting
against the more enlightened values of individual freedom and democratic
principles upon which the UN was originally founded.

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